Introduction

Geovation is a UK based organization that plays a crucial role in promoting and accelerating the growth of location, property and geospatial industry start-ups. Backed by Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency for Great Britain, Geovation essentially provides the ideal platform for start-ups to scale and realize their true potential.

As part of their vision, Geovation runs several accelerator programs that provide cash funding up to GBP 20,000. It’s hard to put a price tag on expertise, network, mentoring, visibility and countless other intangibles that are brought to the table, but if pressed, then it would be somewhere around GBP 100,000. 

Accelerator Programs

Location data continues to grow in quantity and relevance. This has given birth to Location Intelligence where companies are using geodata to create insights that are forming the backbone of countless use cases and businesses that are creating a better society.

The accelerator program run by Geovation has played a big part in bolstering this sentiment. Geovation runs a challenge whereby relevant geospatial companies are invited to solve real world problems.

Geovation provides all the necessary support and infrastructure (in the form of data, networking opportunities, research tools etc) to the brightest and best minds in the industry.

Here are some of the challenges - 

Coastal Erosion Challenge

The challenge addresses the growing issue of coastal erosion that is affecting the UK (approximately 17% of the shores). Coastal erosion poses a threat to marine ecosystems, humans and businesses. 

The challenge involves finding a sustainable solution to address the situation. Needless to say this, but geospatial data would play a big role finding a fitting solution.

Geovation provides the participating start-ups with all the necessary resources and tools 

Plastic Coastal Pollution Challenge

This challenge addresses the 12 million tonnes of plastic that is dumped into our oceans every year. The staggering amount of plastic ends up killing 100,000 marine life and needs to be dealt with urgently. 

The challenge involved finding sustainable ways to alleviate the situation. Again, geodata is crucial in getting a complete picture of the problem at hand and creating solutions based on the geo-insights obtained. New technologies of remote sensing the oceans have been extremely helpful in this endeavour.

Some past winners of the challenge include GlobalTrust and SatSense Solutions that created impressive solutions to combat Coastal Pollution issues.

Ellipsis Drive for Spatial Data Management

As mentioned earlier, Geovation deals with an enormous amount of geodata which is disseminated to participating start ups for them to work on. The dissemination of these complicated geospatial datasets is easier said than done.

Traditionally, Geovation encountered a major problem in providing easy access to the countless start-ups participating in the challenge. A bit of word play here, but organizing and managing the data itself became ‘the challenge’. 

Creating analytical dashboards and insights requires a certain base-level of infrastructure. When the infrastructure is missing, data analysts will spend some 80% of their time on building this ad hoc, only to run into scaling and feature limitations later. 

As an organization that is focussed on results, Geovation realized that this issue needs to be addressed. This is where Geovation’s partnership with Ellipsis Drive comes in. Ellipsis Drive acts as the ideal spatial data management tool.

The value of Ellipsis Drive is that it is able to convert tonnes of spatial data into live maps which can be easily actioned upon and analyzed by stakeholders without any additional data structuring. 

Geovation’s raw spatial data can be easily viewed on Ellipsis Drive’s web viewer. Because ED is easily compatible with the majority of the off-the-shelf GIS software (such as Esri, ArcGIS, QGIS etc), GIS experts and analyst can directly get to work, the data science part - analysing spatial data and deducing beautiful, action insights that tie into the use case.

Access control is also a major issue that Ellipsis Drive tackles. Ellipsis Drive gives project owners (Geovation in this case) the freedom to give customizable access as per the need or level. Thus, access doesn’t have to be general anymore, it can be differentiated and restricted as per geographies, roles and organizations.

Final Thoughts

Geovation is an important vehicle in the growth of the geospatial industry. It provides spotlight and guidance to geotech startups at a crucial juncture in their lifecycle, thus allowing them to scale. Their initiatives help fast track the growth of these companies and realize their true potential.

We all agree that location data has the power to truly change the world by providing a whole new dimension to the problems at hand. And empowering companies that work with this data is the fastest and surest way to bring these changes to life.

Ellipsis Drive is indeed delighted to play a part in this vision and be the lens (quite literally) through which the new world is seen.